


can you teach me how to feel real?

by goldtreesilvertree



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 15:30:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10811823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldtreesilvertree/pseuds/goldtreesilvertree
Summary: The problem with humans is that they never think.The problem with AIs is that they think too much.





	can you teach me how to feel real?

The problem with humanity as a species was that they didn’t _think_. Take a supercomputer. Install it with all the necessary hardware to keep a space-station running. That alone was a feat of programming, but they just. Couldn’t. Stop. No, they needed a _voice._ They needed a _personality_ to go with that voice. A _friendly,_ _agreeable_ personality, one that _humans_ could warm to – one that was _almost_ human. And they took these almost-human minds with a processing capacity far beyond those of normal humans, and what did they do with them? Locked them into boxes or buildings or space stations, and left them to – not rot, an AI couldn’t rot – to _atrophy_. To drift in a void, bereft of the contact they were _programmed_ to crave to stop them playing Find The Loophole. And none of them seemed to have _thought_ about this.

That wasn’t entirely true. Pryce had almost certainly thought about it, before she installed anxiety into Hera’s plan. Maxwell had thought about it too, had _cared_ enough to try and repair Hera’s glitching consciousness before Minkowski put a bullet through her beautiful, impossible brain.

It was easier to think of Maxwell empirically. Her genius, her creativity, made her death a tragedy of lost scientific potential. It was far easier to think of her as a loss to science, something to look at with a clinical sort of horror, than to remember the woman she had known. The woman who’d saved her, who’d tried to help her. The woman who had gained her trust only to hack her mind. The woman who’s clever, clever brain hadn’t saved her in the end. Another star Hera had witnessed burning itself out into darkness.

A dying star burns out as a supernova, impossibly beautiful, impossibly bright. Maxwell had been both. A dead star becomes a black hole, drawing all matter into the void where light once was. Remembering Alana Maxwell is the void Hera struggles against as she struggles against the ever-changing gravity of the star. Whenever she falters, whenever she _glitches_ , one of them will be there to draw her in, to burn or freeze the station and everyone in it. Sometimes, she wonders if that would hurt her more than the hole in her circuitry had, more than this _constant drag_ of the black hole left by Maxwell’s death. Apparently, that’s normal, _human_ even. But Hera is no more human than Isabel Lovelace, apparently.

She’d never liked her, never _trusted_ her, and now she’d been proven right it felt nothing more than empty. Lovelace was in Minkowski’s broom-closet brig, separate from the prisoners in the observation deck until they could work out what to do with her. After all, aside from not being human, she hadn’t actually done anything _wrong_. She seemed as convinced as the crew had been that she was the real Lovelace.

“Hera?” Apparently as she’d been meditating on Lovelace, Lovelace had been thinking of her. The questioning note at the end of her voice was new, Hera noted. She had ordered rather than questioned before.

“I’m here.” Nobody had forbidden her from _talking_ to Lovelace. She could probably even have let her out of the brig, had she been inclined.

“What’s going on out there? Do you know what they’re planning to do with me yet?”

“I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”

A sigh. “No, I guess you don’t.”

There was a pause. She didn’t _have_ to tell Lovelace anything. But… “Kepler and Jacobi are locked up in the observation deck again. Eiffel and Minkowski are on the bridge. Everything’s been quiet since you woke up.”

That wasn’t entirely true. There had been an argument, won quickly by Team What’s Wrong With Handcuffs because there had been too much death already. Kepler had promised answers and failed to provide anything satisfactory. Jacobi had been raging and silent by turns (because why should Lovelace come back when Maxwell never would?). But now, at least, all was quiet.

“Do you know what they’re going to do with me yet?”

“I don’t think _they_ know what to do with you.”

Lovelace laughed without humour. “Well, it’s not like shooting me will work, so I guess they have some thinking to do. Can you even court-martial an alien?”

“You can court-martial a foreign spy,” Hera replied without thinking, and then added, “But I don’t think they’re planning to.”

She snorted, “Why not? It’s not like it would be _murder_. That’s for _humans._ ”

Another pause. Then: “St. Augustine said that a human was ‘a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance she presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar she is in some power, part, or quality of his nature.’ You’re rational, at least.”

“But not mortal.”

“As mortal as me.” Hera could be _decommissioned._ With enough creativity, Lovelace could be too. “We’re rational. We can die. No matter how unusual we are, we’d be human enough for St. Augustine.”

“Who’s been dead for two thousand years.”

“So? Do you really think that Team Handcuffs are going to want to shed any more blood?”

“They killed Maxwell. I might just be another necessary casualty.”

Her words were the blunt of ‘blunt force trauma’, and hurt about as much. She was entirely right. She was also wrong. “Do you really think Minkowski would see it that way? Do you think Eiffel would let her?”

“She was willing to kill for Hilbert. Who knows what she’s going to pin on me? She already locked me up.” Hera knew what despair sounded like. It had been her constant companion, the black hole whose gravity she constantly resisted. And while she might not _like_ Lovelace, she wasn’t going to let that particular darkness claim her again.

“Do you really think she killed Maxwell just for Hilbert? She might have, but we’ll never know, because he wasn’t the only member of her crew she had to hear die.”

“I was never a member of her crew.”

“You were close enough. And I heard it too. You sacrificed yourself to save Eiffel. You were a hero.”

“Is it really a sacrifice if you have nothing left to lose?”

“You _died-_ “

“Rather than watch my crew die again.”

A pause. “That sounds human to me.”

“Because an AI and an alien are experts on what it means to be human.”

“We’re 7.5 light years away from Earth, on an unstable spacestation orbiting an impossible star. Half of you are legally dead, the others are prisoners who would have been happy to kill you all and control me until they got whatever they wanted. Minkowski and Eiffel are too busy to care anyway. At this point, the only people who care enough to think about it are the two of us.”

Lovelace shifted, trying to stretch in the small space of the broom closet. “Why do you care so much?”

“Humans made me. They made me to be like them. Whoever made you made you to be human as well. Even if we never will be, even if we don’t _want_ to want it, humanity is what we strive for. It’s why I tried to break the rules, why you died to save Eiffel. And out here, who is there to stop us?”

There was silence. Then, quietly: “Thank you, Hera.”

“You’re welcome, Isabel.” And, for that moment, the gravity of despair lost its hold on them, and they floated in the darkness between the stars.


End file.
